2025 Subaru Forester Sport – MORE TO LIKE

2025 Subaru Forester Sport

MORE TO LIKE

If you’re ready to be rough and ready, while minimizing ‘rough’ and underscoring ‘ready’, there are few better options than those provided by your Subaru dealer. With the exceptions of the base Impreza hatch and WRX 4-door, Subaru presents a lineup fully suitable to a weekend escape…if one avoids boulders or fallen trees while enroute to that escape. The platforms are perfect for what confronts you on our crumbling infrastructure and, whether wanting to hike or bike (or even bird watch), Subaru’s all-season capability will get you to the trailhead. Or bird.

Subaru’s compact Forester is, arguably, the best of the breed. With more room than the smaller Crosstrek and less mass than the slightly awkward Outback, the Forester, now in a new, updated iteration for 2025, is a versatile crossover for your everyman/anything persona. Competing in a segment long dominated by Honda’s CR-V and Toyota’s RAV4, the Forester is fully capable of navigating the blighted urban streetscape during the week, and then get you to the Hill Country – or, for that matter, any hill – on the weekend. Those days and weekends are made easier by the list of updates made by the Forester product team for 2025. 

My reference point for the Forester is a base version my wife and I purchased new in the fall of 2010. We needed a car for a second home in Southern California, and while a WRX hatch was what I wanted, an auto-equipped Forester was what we got. Its upright architecture was perfect for the occasional third or fourth passenger, and the fold-down rear seats took my bike wherever I wanted to take the bike. And while the base powertrain fell well short of exciting, it did what it was asked to do – and did it with a reasonable degree of efficiency.

In 2025 the Forester, like most of us, has grown! Its 3,600+ pounds sit on a wheelbase of 105 inches, while its 4-door with hatch bodyshell stretches over 15 feet. The sheetmetal is tweaked for 2025, but is immediately identifiable as a Forester and, by extension, a Subaru. Since last purchasing a new Subaru – a base Crosstrek – in 2014, Subaru’s sheetmetal has become increasingly more ‘individualistic’, and while styling is largely subjective, I do wish the product team would tone it down. Front overhangs are too long, wheels and tires are too small, and the cladding is applied as almost improv comedy. In contrast to our 2010, today’s Forester looks as if it’s wearing prosthetics; that’s in sharp contrast to earlier generations, which – in hindsight – look almost unified.   

If working through those design conflicts, once inside I was pleased by the Forester’s more generous room, good outward visibility, and a dash layout that’s reasonably informative and generally intuitive. In our Forester Sport midrange trim the driver is given a power seat adjustment, while the front passenger’s is manual, but both enjoy heated seats (and with October’s temps now in the low ‘40s, they are a nice add…), along with plenty of head and shoulder room. 

In back, two adults have as much space as most overstuffed Americans will require, and if not overstuffed a third adult can reside comfortably in the middle. Passengers have up to 107 cubic feet for themselves, and an additional 28 cubic feet of cargo space behind the rear seat – and 69 cubic feet if folded.

Behind the wheel the Forester’s 2.5 liter boxer four seems less agricultural than we’ve come to expect, while its 180 horsepower and 178 lb-ft of torque are exactly what we’ve come to expect. Car and Driver magazine reached 60 in 8.3 seconds, and while that number isn’t sleep inducing, if you still carry the performance gene you’ll wish you had gotten the WRX. And don’t look to Subaru’s CVT transmission to instill even the suggestion of a grin; this is, for the most part, transportation as a tool, made to get you from Point A to Point B in safety, which it does with a modicum of efficiency.

That efficiency is waiting for a hybrid boost, as the Forester Sport’s current EPA estimate of 25 City/32 Hwy and 28 Combined falls well short of what Honda and Toyota are offering in their hybrids. At one point Subaru countered with its all-wheel drive capability, but almost everyone is offering all-wheel drive, and most competitors with AWD provide some vestige of wilderness trim.

With pricing from the low ‘$30s to low ‘$40s, the Forester Sport – at around $37K – is a credible split of the difference. For those seeking a rational commute it’s a reasonably good deal, and for those heading outbound it’s one helluva lot more comfortable than that Wrangler.